Bootstrap Environment Setup

It is very easy to setup and start using Bootstrap. This chapter will explain how to download and setup Bootstrap. It will also discuss the Bootstrap file structure, and demonstrate its usage with an example.

Download Bootstrap

You can download the latest version of Bootstrap from http://getbootstrap.com/. When you click on this link, you will get to see a screen as below:

Here you can see two buttons:

Download Bootstrap: Clicking this, you can download the precompiled and minified versions of Bootstrap CSS, JavaScript, and fonts. No documentation or original source code files are included.

Download Source: Clicking this, you can get the latest Bootstrap LESS and JavaScript source code directly from GitHub.

If you work with Bootstrap's uncompiled source code, you need to compile the LESS files to produce usable CSS files. For compiling LESS files into CSS, Bootstrap officially supports only Recess , which is Twitter's CSS hinter based on less.js.

For better understanding and ease of use, we shall use precompiled version of Bootstrap throughout the tutorial . As the files are complied and minified you don't have to bother every time including separate files for individual functionality. At the time of writing this tutorial the latest version (Bootstrap 3) was downloaded.

File structure

Precompiled Bootstrap

Once the compiled version Bootstrap is downloaded, extract the ZIP file, and you will see the following file/directory structure:

As you can see there are compiled CSS and JS (bootstrap.*), as well as compiled and minified CSS and JS (bootstrap.min.*). Fonts from Glyphicons are included, as is the optional Bootstrap theme.

Bootstrap Source Code

If you downloaded the Bootstrap source code then the file structure would be as follows:

The files under less/, js/, and fonts/ are the source code for Bootstrap CSS, JS, and icon fonts (respectively).

The dist/ folder includes everything listed in the precompiled download section above.

docs-assets/, examples/, and all *.html files are Bootstrap documentation.

Here you can see the jquery.js and bootstrap.min.js and bootstrap.min.css files are included to make a normal HTM file to Bootstrapped Template. Just make sure to include jQuery library before you include Bootstrap library.

More details about each of the elements in this above piece of code will be discussed in the chapter Bootstrap CSS Overview.

This template structure is already included as part of the Try it tool. Hence in all the examples (in the following chapters) of this tutorial you shall only see the contents of the <body> element. Once you click on the Try it option available at the top right corner of example, you will see the entire code.

Example

Now let's try an example using the above template. Try following example using Try it option available at the top right corner of the below sample code box: